Unless the dragon was set to “stun”.
Speaking of the mad king , was the mad king idea inspired by George III of England/UK who was king in 1776? At the end of his life he had a lot of mental problems and his son ruled as prince regent for the last 10 years of George III’s life. There was even a movie called the Madness of King George about him.
And it’s interesting that she “realized” that, since for what we’ve seen up to this point, the people of Westeros are perfectly fine with having whoever has the biggest army as their ruler, and love has got little to do with any of it. That seems to me like a soap opera motivation.
Does it? Because, sure, you have your occasional Genghis Khan, but most of the time, the other 95%, history is full of boring alliances and politicking.
Sure, and if she was this level of crazy, it would have shown. But again, soap opera narrative.
I don’t buy that rationalization. She can’t think of other ways to instill fear in the peasants other than to raze the seat of power of her family’s dynasty?
Reads like a psychotic break caused by the death of Missandei and some not very friendly people questioning her claim to the throne.
Bullshit.
The fact that I disagree with you doesn’t mean i “haven’t been paying attention.” You can shove that implication up your red keep. It would certainly be possible to generate madness from the story of the first seven seasons, but to do it convincingly would have taken more time and, quite frankly, more skill than the current set of writers and producers want to invest.
My beef isn’t that they made her mad; it’s that they were too lazy and too over the series to do it in a convincing manner. It’s consistent with other aspects of seasons 7 and 8, such as the dramatic speeding up and compression of the timeline, where people move hundreds of miles in a blink of an eye because the writers and the producers lost patience with the pacing of the story. They could have written the show in a way where this all makes sense, but they’ve been writing like an undergrad whose paper is due tomorrow and who hasn’t even started reading the source material.
Even if something has been forshadowed you still need to find a realistic way to make it happen, the foreshadowing is NOT that.
If I may be picky, sorry, but it’s actually an important point, she makes these points EXPLICITY. Not implicity. She up and says, in clear and unambiguous terms, she will rule by fear.
I’m not sure what “soap opera narrative” means.
It strikes me as being incredibly obvious that this HAS shown. We have watched the woman get angrier and crazier over the course of months. She was often cruel and violent before that. She had a messianic complex. People have been worried about her temper for, in the show’s universe, years. I cannot see this as being a surprise.
It is well established in the GOT universe that dragonfire destroys buildings. Harrenhal, tjhe largest and strongest castle in Westeros, is a literal example of it; Tywin and Arya have a conversation about how dragons damaged it. Jon mentions to Daenerys that dragons can be used to “melt castles,” and other characters caution Daenerys AGAINST using her dragons to destroy buildings, which suggests that they seem to believe that is a thing dragons can do - presumably because Aegon the Conqueror and his sisters did it.
This criticism keeps coming up, and I think it’s really unwarranted. We’ve seen the ballistae used three times against dragons:
- Used for the first time, from an ambush on land, against a dragon flying just above the heads of an army; it damaged but didn’t kill the dragon. Was it only a single shot that was fired? I can’t remember.
- Used for the second time, by a fleet that was hiding behind a rocky island, against two dragons that were scouting King’s Landing. They were really high up, and probably were focused on KL, not on the water, and were flying slowly for scouting, not quickly for attack runs. They didn’t notice the fleet immediately and weren’t watching for an attack. Even then, an entire fleet’s worth of ballistae managed to land three shots before the surviving dragon regrouped. Once Dany knew where the attack was coming from and was flying like she was in a fight, no more ballistae shots landed. She panicked and flew away.
- Used for the third time, against a dragon who was doing the ambush instead of vice versa, they were completely useless. Their power is in their incredible force, not in their maneuverability. Dany was able to see where they were slowly swiveled to aim at and evade every shot in this case, attacking from a superior position and then repositioning faster than the ballistae could be effectively aimed. She annihilated the ballistae without taking a single wound.
What I take from that is that the ballista are devastating against slow-moving or unaware enemies, but useless against an aware, fast-moving enemy. It’s both a reasonable weapon and consistent across the three battles.
Tyrion is beyond inept. After she tells him, “Ima kill your ass if you fuck up again,” he’s like, “Okay, but remember to accept my sister’s city’s surrender when the bells ring!” and then he’s off to free his treacherous brother from captivity, to go do God knows what in King’s Landing.
I’m totally on Team Tyrion here, but from Dany’s perspective Tyrion just knowingly betrayed her, for the last goddamn time. As did Varys, as did Jon (who disobeyed her directive to keep his heritage secret). Missandei and Gray Worm didn’t betray her, and Missandei’s last wish was “Dracerys!” said above the wall of King’s Landing, and I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that Gray Worm hasn’t gainsaid that wish.
Dany is a genius at ambushes and at putting herself on the top of hopeless situations and at using her dragons for their maximum military power. But she’s absolute shit at boring alliances and politicking. I think she knows that about herself, and has decided that if all you have is a hammer, the whole world starts to look like a goblin’s face. She’s the 5%.
Harrenhal melted, that’s what dragon fire is supposed to do to stone. Not explode it.
Thank you! If you write Daenerys as, say, having to kill innocents in order to get rid of a Lannister platoon going after her unsullied, and she makes the hard choice, then sure, the plot twist has been properly set up.
If you turn her into a bad Bond Villain just becaquse you want to shock the audience, then no. This is WWE-level writing.
She was honoring Missandei’s last wish, which conveniently fit her emotional state. This wasn’t out of the blue.
Problem is that, for every time you can point out Danereys acted ruthlessly in the past, three times when she acted rationally, tried to rule by peace and was forgiving even with her enemies also happened. That’d be like pointing out that John had been quite violent when necessary in the past, so If Jon had stabbed Dany in the back because his secret plan was to become the King all along, that’d make sense.
Oh, no, I got that. Problem is that Dany hasn’t been shown as that prone to burning children, no matter what her friend says, until it became convenient for the plot twist.
Do they have any reason to know this with absolute certainty, though? Just a few seasons ago, no one knew the Night King existed. Who’s to say that he/it doesn’t have an heir, waiting to raise a new army?
If I remember correctly, she was gracious in victory, when she was surrounded by allies, and when she held out her dream of being the beloved Queen of the Seven Kingdoms. She doesn’t have any of that now. Her ambition and her idealism crashed, and it was the idealism that shattered.
It’s not that it was “convenient for the plot twist,” it’s that her ambition is her fatal flaw, and this showis all about how fatal flaws are fatal.
It would’ve been mighty convenient if she had taken a deep breath and said, “I’ve always been 100% terrible at the sort of compromises and making-nice that you have to do to rule peacefully, but I’m a big kid now, so I’ll humble myself and learn how to do it.” That would’ve been out of character for her. But she didn’t do that. She stayed true to form, and prioritized pride and ambition above everything else.
There’s a line I don’t think I’ve seen much discussion of. It’s something like,
It’s the scene in which she is justifying, to herself, the mass-murder she plans to commit the next day, and it’s precisely the sort of double-talk that idealistic tyrants have used to justify some of the worst atrocities in history.
And that should turn her a bit more cynical, not a bit more mass-murdery. I don’t think the writers earned that turn.
Actually she had been pretty good at making compromises. She compromised at Mereen and ruled alongside the slavers. You talk like she had always been some sort of hothead, but that’s not what I’ve seen until the last two episodes.
I feel like people are talking past one another a bit here. I entirely agree that Dany has been shown, not just recently but throughout her entire life, as pathologically ambitious, ruthless, prone to violent solutions and bored by diplomatic ones. I also agree that the writers had done a good job of showing how her attempts at solutions that would minimize collateral damage were constantly frustrated, and that Emilia Clarke was doing a great job of showing that her patience with those kinds of solutions was slipping. I think they had laid the groundwork for Dany to get violent, disregard the lives of the noncombatants, and pursue victory without scruples.
So if she had flat out slaughtered the surrendering Lannister soldiers, I’d have bought it. If she had then followed that up by flying directly to the Red Keep and flattening it, killing however many citizens were inside without a second thought, I’d have bought that, too. In fact, it would have set up a slightly more complicated moral conversation (of the kind GoT used to do so well!), because her choices, while ruthless and arguably cruel, would not have been capital-E evil in a Ramsay Bolton fashion.
'Cause that’s the thing. What Dany has never been is Ramsey Bolton. I am not saying that I can’t buy her being violent, ruthless, angry, or callous. What I, and I think others are saying, is that I very specifically and in particular don’t buy her deliberately and explicitly targeting mothers and children.
It turns her into a cartoon villain (like Ramsay was, or Joffrey or the Mountain), instead of an interesting villain (like a Tywin or a Cersei Lannister). It makes the end of the story dull and oversimplified, since overnight they made Dany not just ruthless or violent or callous or cruel, but just blankly and stupidly evil, so obviously she has to lose and die.
The idea that the only way to “rule by fear” is to specifically target children is a level of oversimplification that is, frankly, beneath this show. Just leveling the Red Keep wouldn’t have made people fear her? Come on.
Your mileage may vary, and obviously does.
But hey, can we please leave out the stuff like “if you don’t think X, you haven’t been paying attention?” I’m pretty sure we’ve all been paying attention, and it’s just a TV show, if it works for one person and not for another I don’t think either of those people has to be objectively wrong.
I get that that’s the objection. But she didn’t deliberately and explicitly target mothers and children, any more than Allied forces targeted mothers and children in Dresden or Hiroshima. They targeted everyone, out of a sense that an appalling devastation of a city would cut the Gordian knot of complicated post-battle negotiations.
Dany? She wants to clear the board, not of Japanese surrender-negotiating ambassadors, but of anyone who would conceivably stand against her in the future. She doesn’t want the children and mothers in King’s Landing to die, she wants the traitors there to die, the traitors who refuse to rise to up overthrow the pretender in favor of their true queen, the traitors who stood by and did nothing while her beloved friend was murdered, the friend whose final wish was for her to burn the city to the ground. And by burning this whole city, Dany is clearing the way for a world with no tyrants; it is a merciful act.
She’s not thinking about children and mothers. She’s thinking about vengeance and power-grabbing, cloaked in the high-minded bullshit that tyrants always use.
I will point out that every time she tried to do that she was betrayed (Meereen especially). I can easily imagine her saying screw this trying to be a peaceful ruler crap.
Though I think they could have done the turn better.